


December

by ladysisyphus



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-02
Updated: 2009-03-02
Packaged: 2017-12-12 09:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the sad December sleepover ficbits, compiled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	December

To the team's credit, they'd managed to organize among themselves -- completely without his consent or involvement -- a sort of rotating schedule, whereby he could be assured that every evening, somewhere just past dinnertime, one (or occasionally two) of them would show up at his door, takeout dinner in one hand and overnight bag in the other. Privately, he began to think of it as his suicide watch, even though he never said so aloud because he didn't want to seem ungrateful, and he was unspeakably grateful for the company.  
  
Tonight, a telltale tornado of knocks exploded against the front door, and Souji was therefore totally unsurprised to find Chie on the other side, dripping slightly from the evening drizzle, grinning sweetly and holding a steaming plastic bag. "Special delivery! Two beef bowls, hot and ready!"  
  
He never had the heart to tell them he wasn't hungry, but the others would at least let him get away with rearranging the food and shoving the majority of it in the fridge with the fiction that he'd eat it later. Chie, however, had apparently been taught that the best cure for any ailment was to eat until you burst at the seams, and so she watched him like a hawk across the low table, frowning so sternly that sheer terror compelled each further bite into his mouth. "Come on! Food is good for you!" she chided from Nanako's usual spot.  
  
"I'm eating, I'm eating," he promised her, and swallowed another mouthful, declining to point out that she herself had barely managed down more than the top layer of her bowl.  
  
"Not eating enough!" She folded her arms across her chest and nodded sternly, as though the pose made it all true, nodding him on as he chewed down another piece of meat. "And when you're done, I brought some of my best kung fu movies! You choose: _Silver Dragon Master_ or _Cloud Samurai II_?"  
  
Souji tapped his chopsticks thoughtfully against the side of the styrofoam bowl. "Which one do you think I'd like better?"  
  
"No, I mean, which one do you want to watch _first_?" Before he could give an answer, her cell phone's text message signal interrupted, and she went digging for it through her pockets. "That's probably my mom. I told her I'd be at Yukiko's tonight, and she-- Oh, no, it's Yosuke."  
  
"Yosuke?" echoed Souji, although a mouthful of rice garbled the name to an indistinguishable mumble.  
  
Instead of answering, Chie turned the display so that Souji could see and held it across the table: **You're supposed to be on tonight, right? Is he okay? Let me know if you need me to come over.**  
  
Satisfied after a moment that Souji'd had long enough to read it, Chie flipped the phone back toward her and started punching at the keypad with her thumb. "If I don't text him back in the next, like, thirty seconds? He'll already be on his bike heading over here, rain or no rain."  
  
Feeling a bit sheepish, Souji poked at a sliver of ginger that had previously escaped his notice. "You all don't have to do this, you know," he said quietly, staring down into his admirably half-finished dinner.  
  
He was shocked from his moment of self-pity, however, by an expertly thrown pair of extra wooden chopsticks that smacked him right in the middle of the forehead. "Dumbass," mumbled Chie, her customarily bright smile eclipsed by a cloud of sadness; she stabbed away at her own meal, rearranging the beef with ferocity. "What _else_ are we supposed to do?"  
  
Souji reached across the table and took her free hand, and held it there, feeling how cold both their fingers were, how they both trembled slightly with the exertion of contact. Maybe, he thought, the suicide watch went both ways.

 

~*~

 

"I've gathered all the evidence made available to me," said Naoto to Souji as she paced around the floor of Dojima's otherwise empty house, "and I've come to a conclusion."  
  
Souji took a sip of the canned coffee she'd brought over with her -- a weird counterpoint to the lemon cake she'd picked up for dessert, but he wasn't one to point out the flaws in anyone's compassionate generosity -- and made a twirling gesture with his hand as he leaned back against the sofa. "Proceed."  
  
"Thank you." She reached up to her head, presumably to tap the brim of her cap, only she'd taken the cap off earlier during dinner, and as such barely salvaged the gesture from awkwardness by running her fingers through her short hair. "Logically, we know the killer must have been someone in the house, someone connected to the dead man and his estate. The suspects are clear: each had means, motive, and opportunity -- no matter how non-standard any of those may seem. A good detective never rules out the absurd until it has been proven unhelpfully improbable."  
  
"Naturally," nodded Souji. He played with the cards in his hand, keeping them secreted beneath the low table.  
  
"Thus," Naoto continued, "having established alibis for all of the women in the house at the time -- including the domestic servants and other household staff -- we turn our attention to the men. While they all seem like persons of unimpeachable standing in their respective communities, we both know that _that_ is hardly sufficient grounds to exonerate someone from suspicion." She gave Souji a meaningful look, and he nodded in kind, though the gravity of his gesture was somewhat impugned by his having a mouth full of delicious lemon cake. "And while physical prowess is also unreliable as a sole predictor of homicidal behaviour, if my calculations are correct, the killer would have needed not only to have dealt the blow with an impressive amount of force, but would then have found it necessary to move the body from one room to another, in order to divert suspicion from the _actual_ location where the murder took place. In addition, studies _have_ shown that men with military training and experience are statistically more likely of being involved in incidents of assault and murder than are their civillian counterparts. After considering all those factors, it was simple dediction."  
  
She drew herself up to her full height, squared her shoulders, and pointed accusingly at the game board in front of Souji. "Colonel Mustard, with the candlestick, in the library!"  
  
Souji let her accusation rest for a beat, then flipped around the three cards he held so she could see them. "Actually, Professor Plum in the hall. But you got the candlestick part, that was good."  
  
"What?" Naoto sounded wet-cat indignant, snatching the answer cards from Souji's fingers. "He's a tenured professor at a private university, he has nothing to gain from this! And of _course_ the body was _found_ in the hall, but he couldn't have been _killed_ in the hall without arousing suspicion from anyone in earshot! The library is _right there_ , and the bookcases, carpets, and heavy draperies would have absorbed nearly all of the noise! Only a trained military man would have taken all these facts into consideration!"  
  
As she slumped dejectedly down onto her seat cushion, Souji pushed her square of cake closer to her. "Maybe it was a crime of passion," he suggested helpfully.  
  
Naoto sighed, but the suggestion did seem to lighten her mood an inch. "Of course," she nodded, picking up her fork and poking at the white cream frosting with one hand, resting her chin in the other. "I always forget to take that possibility into account."  
  
"You'll get the killer next time," he reassured her, sweeping up the miniature weapons and getting ready for the next round of wonderfully distracting sleepover Clue with the detective prince.

 

~*~

 

"You know what I always wanted to be when I grew up? When I was a little girl, I mean?" Rise asked, not lifting her head from where it rested against Souji's shoulder.  
  
"What?" asked Souji, turning his head so he didn't get a mouthful of her hair. They'd wound up stretched on the downstairs couch, watching the TV because the house was too quiet without its multitude of voices, with Rise tucked half beside and half on top of his body; they'd made out for a while earlier, until they'd gotten distracted first by a text message from Chie, then by the evening news. Still, he hadn't bothered to remove his hand from where he'd slipped it up the back of her shirt, and she certainly hadn't asked him to.  
  
Rise giggled a little. "A math teacher."  
  
"A _math_ teacher?" Souji echoed, a bit incredulous. Rise wasn't stupid by anyone's standards -- to the contrary, the school notice board's test rankings showed she could keep up with the best of her class -- but it still seemed a surprising choice of occupation. "I've been called a nerd before, and it's a little true, but even _I've_ never thought, you know what? I think what my life needs is a little more math."  
  
She swatted at his shoulder with more affection than force, and he laughed as he wrapped his arms more tightly around her waist. "It seemed like fun! I had a really good math teacher, and he had a whole bunch of colourful posters on the walls, and he used to bring cupcakes and oranges to teach about multiplication and division, and he even taught us a couple math songs."  
  
Souji nodded quietly, considering this all carefully -- and then, unable to resist the opportunity to tease, asked "You know _math songs_?"  
  
"I know math songs!" said Rise proudly, lifting her head just enough that he could see that she was sticking her tongue out at him with all her might. "And I thought, wow, you get to play with divisible food, and teach kids counting songs, and get summers off? Sign me up!" She laughed again, and then her laugh trailed off into silence, and she tucked herself a little closer to his body before speaking again. "Of course, then the whole idol thing, and ... well, plans change!"   
  
Souji couldn't see her face, but he could hear that last phrase sounded a little too bright, with the sharp edge he'd come to associate with 'Risette's' forced appearances. On the nearly muted television across the room, the meterorologist showed a graph with nothing for the future but fog, fog, fog. "Maybe ... you still could be someday," he offered. "Nobody says you can't be an idol and _then_ a math teacher. Besides, you're great with kids."  
  
"Thanks, Senpai. That means a lot to me, coming from you." Rise bent upward and planted a kiss on the underside of his jaw. "...You know, you're probably the only person in the _whole world_ who would rather hang out with Rise Kujikawa the third grade math teacher than with Rise Kujikawa the idol."  
  
"I am a man of discerning tastes," Souji told her, trying to sound as snooty as possible, and this time when she kissed him, she made it all the way up to his mouth.

 

~*~

 

"Dude, wow," said Kanji, shooting Souji a thumbs-up gesture across the table, "that looks _just_ like a platypus."  
  
Holding a shiny aluminum crochet hook in one hand and the tangled remnants of a ball of yarn in the other, Souji was fairly sure that the deflated brown lump in front of him looked less like a platypus and more like something no decent person would crochet for a little girl. "I think one leg is a little shorter than the others."  
  
"If you put a little extra stuffing in it, no one'll ever be able to tell." Kanji didn't even look down at his needles, which danced back and forth as he talked, spinning out a long, complicated silver strip. This, he had explained earlier, would be sewn around the edge of a gauze-thin lavender sheet Kanji had brought over with him, and the finished project would be suspended from the ceiling and walls to make a princess canopy over the corner of the room where Nanako usually rolled out her futon. Souji freely admitted that he had little idea how precisely that was supposed to work, but Kanji seemed determined, so Souji was willing to go with it.  
  
"Maybe it'll be less creepy when it has eyes." Souji lifted and looked at its blank face, which stared sightlessly back at him over a fuzzy grey bill.  
  
Kanji laughed, and his hands never stilled. "You know, you could probably just tie a lot of yarn into a big knot, and take it to her, and she'd love it because _you_ made it for her."  
  
"I've got enough big knots already," Souji said, tugging at the mess the remaining yarn had become. "Maybe I should just go back to tape measure duty." Upon his arrival earlier that evening, Kanji had put Souji to work measuring nearly everything he could in Nanako's room, from the size of her pillows to the frames on her windows to the dimensions of her door. Surely he could find _something_ he'd missed.  
  
"You can't give up!" Kanji let go of his project long enough to shake a determined fist at Souji. "This stuff," he gestured to the purple and silver material arrayed around him, waiting to be cut and fashioned into fancy curtains and bedspreads and pillowcases, "is for when she gets better and comes home, but it's your job to finish Mr. Platypus and give it to her tomorrow, Senpai! I mean, she's all alone in that hospital! What if she gets lonely in the middle of the night? What if she has a nightmare? What if she gets scared and needs a hug, and nobody's there to hug her?"  
  
Souji heard a hitch in Kanji's voice, and looked up from his untangling task to see the slightest halo of red begin to rim Kanji's eyes. "Kanji...?"  
  
Biting at his lower lip, Kanji scraped the heel of his hand hard across his cheeks. "It's just...." He sighed and looked to Nanako's customary place at the table. "Shit, I'm sorry, Senpai. I'm supposed to be over here cheering you up, not making you depressed too."  
  
"It's okay." Souji smiled past the threat of tears that pricked at the corners of his own eyes, then took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky laugh. "So, Mr. Platypus," he said firmly, clutching his crochet hook with renewed vigor, "let's see about getting you a nice flat tail."  
  
"That's the spirit!" Kanji grinned back. "He'll do great at the hospital. The platypus is a very brave animal. They've got poisonous spines on their feet! ...You, uh, might want to leave those off, though."  
  
"He'll just have to learn how to be brave without them," Souji said, wrapping a loop of yarn around his hook and starting the next row.

 

~*~

 

He jumped at the sound of footsteps, nearly dropping both mug and spoon to the floor, and turned to see a slightly startled Yukiko standing just beyond the halo of the kitchen's single bulb above the sink. "I'm sorry," Souji said, "did I wake you?"  
  
"Oh, no, don't worry about it," answered Yukiko, and her voice was clear enough that he believed her. She dragged her fingers through her slightly rumpled hair, which, freed from its customary headband, seemed bound and determined to settle into her face. "Chie fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow," she pointed back toward Nanako's room, where the girls had set up the large spare futon, "but I've been up reading, so I heard you come down."  
  
"I just couldn't sleep." Souji opened the cabinet nearest to his head and took down the box of instant coffee, squinting at the back in the dim light for directions.  
  
Yukiko leaned against the refrigerator door and folded her arms across her chest, losing her hands in the overlong sleeves of her pajamas. "So you thought _coffee_ would help," she said with a dry smile, raising an eyebrow.  
  
Souji thought about this for a moment, standing there in the kitchen, the floor cold beneath his bare toes, noticing how the muted glow from the kitchen bulb caught the deep red highlights beneath her dark hair -- then reached into the cabinet and pulled out a second mug, holding it toward her with a questioning look.  
  
"Please," she nodded, walking over to the kitchen table table. She pulled out one of the chairs, regarding the setup -- and then cleared aside some of the weeks-old mail that had piled up there and sat _on_ the table, her socked feet resting demurely on the chair's seat. He wondered if Chie had taught her that one, or if it was a habit of her own, one that she only let out in the dark hours beyond midnight, when nobody who didn't matter was watching. "...I didn't want to mention it when Chie was around, because I didn't want her to be sad that I'd gone without her, but I had an errand to run near the hospital yesterday, so I stopped by. They wouldn't let me in to Nanako-chan's room, of course -- but I saw your uncle, just from a distance. I waved, and he waved back, and smiled a little."  
  
At the mention of his uncle, Souji's grip faltered around the handle of the electric kettle, and the tap water he was filling it with ran instead over his hand. "You know," he said after a moment, staring at the patterns of light across the water's surface, "coffee's _his_ job. Or, at least, it's supposed to be. ...He's actually kind of possessive about it."  
  
For a moment, he thought she might say something perfectly reasonable in response, something nice and appropriate and expectable, like, 'everything's going to be all right', or, 'I'm sure he wouldn't mind', or even, 'it's just coffee'. But she was quiet instead as he filled the kettle to the lid and plugged it into the wall, quiet all the way until he turned back to look at her and saw a pair of her fingers upraised. "Two sugars, please, no cream."  
  
"At your service, ma'am," Souji said, giving her a low waiter's bow, and the sound of her bright giggle filled the room.

 

~*~

 

"Hey," said Yosuke, his voice barely louder than a whisper.  
  
Souji, who had been nine-tenths of the way to sleep, cracked open an eye. The light from the DVD player was the room's only real glow, and it showered them with pale blue as they slept, Yosuke and Souji on their futons side-by-side on the cleared floor of Souji's bedroom, Teddie sprawled across the couch nearby and making astonishingly cute little snoring noises. "What?" he tried to say, only it came out as little more than an inquisitive grunt.  
  
"I ... just wanted to tell you something," said Yosuke, sounding _way_ too awake for the hour, by Souji's estimation. For a moment, the world sounded like rain -- and then the sound receded into the distance; probably just a truck, Souji thought drowsily, driven by someone who, like Yosuke, was up well beyond a reasonable hour. "I mean, if it's okay. ..No, you know what, never mind. Go to sleep. I mean, it's not a big deal. Just, you know, me and thinking, doesn't go together well. So ... um, go to back to sleep."  
  
Of course, by the time Yosuke was done reciting his laundry list of excuses, Souji was far enough away from sleep that staying there for a minute more didn't seem like too much of a hardship. "What is it?" he asked, leaning in closer to make sure his voice didn't wake Teddie; that bear wouldn't go back to sleep for _hours_ , and Souji and Yosuke had a geography quiz in the morning.  
  
"It's just...." Yoskue sighed and drew his blanket closer to his chin, half-obscuring his face. "Okay, so sometimes I talk about all the friends I had back before Inaba, you know?" He took a deep breath and let it shiver out of his chest again. "...I didn't really. Have any friends, I mean. I mean, I _did_ , but they weren't really _friends_. They were just, you know, people I saw at school, maybe people I went to the movies or a show with. But just people. I don't think any of them really noticed when I moved away."  
  
"Uh-huh?" Souji nodded, not because he could imagine, but because he didn't have to. With his parents' constantly moving lives, he'd resigned himself at a young age to what he foresaw to be a lifetime of friendless transience, full of brief acquaintances gone at the end of a term or even a full year. He couldn't think of a single person from any of his previous schools to whom he'd spoken in months. He'd never been shunned or born the brunt of any malice, of course -- he'd just been beneath notice.  
  
Yosuke cleared his throat. "But here, I mean ... you, and everybody else, and even that stupid bear ... I mean, we're _all_ together, and that's great, and I like them all too, and there's nothing I wouldn't do for any of them, but...." With a sigh, Yosuke settled his hand beside his face, his fingers relaxed and curled toward his palm, as though he wanted to hide his face but couldn't quite bear to go through with the full gesture. "I just wanted to say, you're my best friend. Like, ever. And I wanted you to know."  
  
Deeply touched, but also deeply almost asleep, Souji could think of no other response to this than to bring his own hand out from beneath the covers and place it across Yosuke's, feeling his cold fingers thaw inside of Yosuke's fiery grip. "Me too," he nodded, hoping he sounded as sincere about it as he felt. "You're my best friend too."  
  
The next thing he knew, dawn had started to slip past the edges of the curtains, and his arm was asleep -- due in largest part, he saw, to how Teddie had apparently decided that the best place to spend the night would be half-between, half- _atop_ his friends on the floor. With a disgruntled grimace against the prospect of waking and facing another school day, he tried to sit up, only to find that though Teddie was pliable to being moved away from Souji's trapped arm, Yosuke, though still fast asleep, wouldn't let go of his hand.


End file.
